Photography by Lori K. Tate
I love it when my week surprises me with a theme, and last week’s theme was closed doors. It all began on Monday when I arrived early for a meeting in Greensboro. To kill time, I drove over to the UNC Greensboro campus. Though I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill, I began my college career at UNC Greensboro — reluctantly. (For more in-depth information on this, read the It’s Not That Hard entry from March 2019.)
The short version of the story is that I didn’t get into Chapel Hill as a freshman, and the only other school that I applied to was UNC Greensboro. I’m 99 percent sure my less-than-stellar SAT score kept me from being a Tar Heel initially, but after years of being ashamed of that and even hiding it, here it is, folks, I bombed the SAT.
Back to Monday. As I stopped my minivan in front of my freshman dorm, I thought about the girl who was in that dorm 29 years ago listening to mixed tapes while trying to grow out her bangs. How crazy it would be to have a conversation with her. I would definitely tell her to proceed with growing out her bangs, but that’s about it because I wouldn’t want to spoil the adventure she was embarking on. I wouldn’t tell her to avoid anything because the good and the bad in her future are going to work together to get her where she needs to be.
I had two great years at UNC Greensboro despite wrestling with an eating disorder/nervous breakdown my sophomore year. Looking back, I realize that I wasn’t ready for Chapel Hill as a freshman, so fate placed me where I could grow to become ready. (Who knows? If I would have started at Chapel Hill, I might have dropped out. I might even still have bangs.)
I was reminded of this when I gave my Scenic Route talk on Thursday to three leadership classes at the high school of my children’s school. My talk is all about having the resiliency and determination to open closed doors. If there is one resounding theme in my career journey as a writer, it is opening doors that at times seemed nailed shut.
The idea is to give these young people insight into what good and bad leadership looks like, while also giving them real world advice. I hope these students get at least half as much as I get by giving the talk. It’s not that I like to talk about myself, and it’s not that this is a talk about my accomplishments. It’s that going through my career play by play out loud reminds me of how far I’ve come (being compensated for an internship with free parking and a grilled chicken sandwich) and how far I still have to go (I so want to write at least one book).
Maybe it’s super narcissistic, but I inspire myself when I talk about the young girl who quit a lucrative sales job to make $100 a week as an editorial assistant just to get her foot in the door of a magazine. The current trampled version of myself needs that girl to come back and open some new doors. I know she’s in there; she just needs a little coaxing. One way to coax the coaxing is to talk with friends who have good perspective, which is exactly what happened Friday morning.
A good friend of mine has been training for a strenuous race that’s offered once a year. The race fills up online in minutes, so she knew she had to sign up immediately. Even though she tried her best, she didn’t get a slot. At first she was terribly disappointed and down, but within two hours she reframed the situation and felt better about it. She kept saying that she believed in closed doors.
Though I had never phrased it that way, my whole life is built around that belief, and it’s not a bad way to live. If something doesn’t turn out the way you planned, look at the remaining variables and chart a new path. Look under the debris for Winks of Goodness because I promise you that they are there.
Every time I’ve done this in my life, the end result is better that I could have ever imagined. Yes, there are painful setbacks and gargantuan challenges. Yes, there are times when you want to stay in bed with your cats, preferably with the covers over all of your heads, but I know from experience that these times make for better people and certainly better stories.
That said, I’m jumping back into the driver’s seat to continue my journey on the scenic route. Sure, there will be potholes, sharp turns and detours, but the trip is well worth it.